Companion
by BackSpaced
Summary: If only my / Nagging companion were here / The moon tonight! - Issa


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COPYRIGHT AND ASSOCIATED INFORMATION:  
  
This work is based on characters and situations that occur in the television series and films associated with Shin Seiki Evangelion. I own none of the rights to Shin Seiki Evangelion or its associated characters.  
  
This piece is not for sale under any circumstances.  
  
It is not to be reproduced in any form, written or electronic, without the express permission of myself, the author. No changes may be permanently recorded without the express permission of selfsame author.  
  
WARNINGS:  
  
I believe that certain sections may be what is termed "lime" depending on your sensitivity. Don't get too excited, though. Consider it a journey into the vale of puberty.  
  
When I get details "wrong," I like them that way.  
  
CONTACT:  
  
backspaced44@hotmail.com  
  
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kogoto iu aite mo araba kyô no tsuki - Issa  
  
If only my / Nagging companion were here / The moon tonight!  
  
...  
  
I watch the sun as it goes down, my eyes squinting to make out the shape of a gull impressed against it, like a pinprick of black on a red balloon. There's a lake in the west, too, over the hills. The gull plunges, vanishing. Or gets lost against the sun. I close my eyes completely, and the scene repeats itself in a kind of negative light: the fat green sun, the lake of skeletons, the lone gull.  
  
I heard screaming high in the rocks. It sounded like two cats fighting, but I didn't think that cats ever came to the beach. Maybe it was another animal, injured or trapped.  
  
It took a bit of climbing, and the rocks were rough with many sharp points. I cut my feet when they slipped out of the sandals for a moment, but I found the source of the sound. The gulls screamed at me from their mutual tangle of feet and feathers. I hadn't thought about it before. I knew that birds mated, but I had always assumed that it was some kind of brief mechanical activity, as in the nature films, where gazelles hump distantly in the tall grass. The birds looked at me, exasperated, before I hurried away. Behind me, the noise continued. I wondered why I'd never thought of it before.  
  
Touji sat on the edge of the dock, talking about how he wished we had some seltzer tablets. "Birds can't burp" he explained, "so when the swallow the tablets, their stomachs get filled with gas, and they pop. Well, not really," he admitted. "They more or less just fall out of the sky. But inside, they pop. My cousin and I did it once. It might come in handy if you ever got stuck on an island somewhere and all you had was a crate of seltzer tablets that washed up. You could live on seagulls for weeks. They don't seem to have much meat on them, though."  
  
"Does it work the antacids?" asked Kensuke.  
  
"I don't know. My cousin didn't tell me about that. I just know that seltzer tablets are fizzier." He kicked his heels against the dock in a steady rhythm. I watched the birds screaming at each other and smelled the fishy reek of the water, thankful that no demonstration was forthcoming. My pole was wedged tightly into a docking ring, along with Kensuke's. One of us was supposed to be watching at all times for the gentle vibrations that indicated a bite, but I felt that I had done more than my fair share this afternoon. I had also begun to doubt that I would want to eat anything that came out of the black, rainbow-covered water in the first place.  
  
"That's okay," Touji said. "We can go gull fishing."  
  
"Gull fishing?"  
  
"Yeah, that's another thing my cousin showed me. You take a fishing pole, like so..."  
  
Touji gestured with a pole that had barely been used in the past few hours.  
  
"...and you attach a piece of your sandwich to the hook. Then, you pull out a bunch of line, and toss the chunk of sandwich into the air. The gull catches it, like they always do, and you jerk the line. Ka-pow! Gull fishing! You can make them fly in circles and everything. They're much easier to catch than fish.  
  
And more fun."  
  
"Cool..." Kensuke intoned. "You've done this before?"  
  
"Plenty of times," Touji said, "with my cousin!"  
  
"I wanna try."  
  
"Okay. Do you have anything left over in your bento box? I don't know if..."  
  
"Stop." I said.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You don't wanna?"  
  
"No. It's cruel."  
  
"Shit, Shinji. They're birds. They don't even have brains. They just fly in circles and scream and stuff. They probably don't live more than a few months anyway."  
  
"That doesn't matter. It's cruel."  
  
"You can leave if you want to," Kensuke added, "You don't have to watch."  
  
"I won't let you. Leave them alone."  
  
"You won't let us leave them alone?"  
  
I felt something hot under my eyelids, trying to force its way through.  
  
"Cut it out, Touji," Kensuke said. "You're really making him mad."  
  
"Jeez. I thought he was a fighter, though. I mean, Angels are smarter than stupid birds and he rips them apart."  
  
"That's different. That's war. You even made his hand twitch!"  
  
"Were you going to punch me again, Shinji?"  
  
I hadn't noticed my hand. I looked down and shook my head.  
  
"It's okay. If it bothers you, we'll stop. You're missing out though."  
  
"I didn't really care that much, anyway. And I'm ready to go home."  
  
"I'm hungry."  
  
"Me too."  
  
"I'll tell you what, though. I think that Shinji just has a hard-on for things that scream a lot."  
  
"No kidding! Things with small, stupid brains that scream a lot!"  
  
Touji laughed. Suddenly, I was laughing too.  
  
I don't think that I noticed her absence at first. I had become so used to the closed-door silences, the empty breakfast table mornings that nothing really seemed to change. Nothing except that the laundry bin in the bathroom stopped filling up. At the end of the week, it was only half- full and when I cleaned it out, there was nothing in it but an endless succession of white shirts, black pants, and faded boxers. One load of darks, one of lights. I almost missed it at the bottom, a pair of powder blue shorts with white trim, wadded up under the bottom layer of my clothing.  
  
Asuka was reading a European magazine of some sort; one with a picture of a model on the cover that was naked to the waist with braids draped over the most interesting parts. She had a large collection of European magazines that she was always piling in various corners of the living room for Pen-Pen to scatter and me to pick up. They seemed to be about fashion, mostly. She always complained that the Japanese fashion magazines were no good. Not that she would ever admit to having problems with the Kanji... it was just that they were out of style, or the hair tips were completely useless for redheads. You just couldn't do Japanese things with European hair. European hair had a different "texture." It was even harder to find the right hair products. They had to be specially ordered from Europe. She had very specific needs when it came to her hair. I was just a boy and I wouldn't understand.  
  
She lay on the couch with her head propped up on a pillow and the magazine on her chest, her knees at forty-five degree angles and perpendicular to one another, one resting against the back of the couch and holding up the magazine on one side, the other resting on a cushion. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that she must be very flexible.  
  
I had been trying to watch television before she had seized the controller and forced me to mute it so that she could concentrate. Now the screen flickered weakly in the background, faces alternating with ocean vistas, the entire scene washed out by the afternoon sun streaming in from the living room window. Dust motes flickered over Asuka's bare ankles, dying and reincarnating through the bands of sunlight that crept between the blinds. All the lines in the room seemed to bend and angle toward her, and my eyes slid along them toward her feet, her legs, the soft bulge of her thighs.  
  
Asuka sighed and shifted a little, lifting her hips to tug at the cushion under her. Her shorts crept higher, and I thought my heart would punch through my ribs. I tried to angle my head so that I could still see her clearly, but could also plausibly be watching television. I knew that if she caught me looking, I would be nursing the bruise for a week, and that she would tell it all to Misato, and that Misato would tell it all to me again, over and over again, laughing as she did, as long as the bruise was there to remind her.  
  
Not that anything like that had ever happened before, but I knew that it would nonetheless.  
  
Somehow, though, it seemed to be worth the risk. I found that if I leaned my head back slightly, I could see the faint crease in her skin that indicated the upper boundary of her thigh, and even higher, the beginning of a rounder, softer curve. My hands shook. She wasn't wearing any underwear. She had just gotten out of the shower, and she wasn't wearing any underwear. I could see every inch of both of her smooth, thin legs, but trembled more with the thought of what I couldn't see. Maybe if I changed my angle of vision again, I could see just a bit more. Maybe if I stood up to get something from the kitchen, I could walk by, and at the right angle, I might just get a transient glimpse. Or she could move again. But that might make things worse.  
  
"Shinji?" Asuka said, dropping the magazine in her lap.  
  
I jerked my head toward the television, and then slowly back to her.  
  
"Yes?" I said, my heart sounding like the footfalls of an Eva moving perilously nearby.  
  
Her expression changed.  
  
"Why are you red?" She asked.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Why are you red? Your face is bright red."  
  
She suddenly seemed a little self-conscious.  
  
"What have you been looking at?"  
  
"Nothing." I said, from under what seemed to be a thousand meters of water.  
  
She glanced at the television suspiciously. There was a shot of a blonde woman in a tight red bathing suit talking to a taller man with curly hair.  
  
"You've been watching perverted American television shows again! How can boys like this crap?" she exclaimed. "All these women have silicone implants and bleached hair! It's crude and it's fake. I should have known that someone like you would like it. Pervert!"  
  
I felt a wave of euphoria just before the magazine hit me in the face.  
  
The woman on the television was running now. Asuka was leaving, too, heading toward the kitchen. As she swept by, I couldn't help thinking that she seemed hurt somehow.  
  
After I finished with the laundry that day, her absence seemed to swell and fill the apartment as if it were a tangible thing of itself, a surrogate Asuka, a quiet one, but no less invasive or confounding. In the shower the next morning, I found thin, red hairs clinging to the white tile just above the level of my eyes. They seemed to be placed with almost habitual precision, like half-formed Kanji or scratches in the wall of a prison cell. All her hair products stood in a neat array, from largest to smallest, the balls and sticks of their European script marching for row after row. One of the cans looked like brushed aluminum, and it seemed to have a spray nozzle on the top. Two others had dispenser tops, like soap bottles. A spray of purple flowers flowed down the sides of yet another. Next to the bottles lay Asuka's razor, which I was instructed never to touch and especially never, ever, to use. She would know if I had. Boys always ruined razors because their beards were so tough. Not that I really had a beard, had ever used a razor, or even felt the need to do so.  
  
I'd never touched the bottles before. Someone as smart as Asuka had probably memorized their positions, and if I moved one, she would notice and I wouldn't be able to deny it. She would know if I used the bottles. She would catch me. I reached out carefully, and picked one up. It was the one with the purple flowers on it. Now that it was closer, I could see that there were other things pictured as well, plants, none of them recognizable, and a lot of writing. The bottle was clear, and the liquid inside was a milky yellow and half gone. It moved slowly around the edges of the bottle as I rotated it in my hands, coating the transparent walls until the bottle seemed full again.  
  
Carefully, I squeezed some of the contents into my palm, lifted it to my face and inhaled.  
  
Her face was only inches from mine in the darkness, her eyes pressed tightly shut, her mouth moving gently as I looked down, down her hair brushing my shoulders her mouth on mine she reached up to pinch my nose closed my breath her breath we were eye to eye so blue her door slid shut she let me go mamma she rolled away.  
  
When I first got to Tokyo Three, I brought a magazine with me, one with the corners furred from too much handling and the spine broken so that it always fell open to the same two pages. I didn't need it much, just to get started. I carried it into the bathroom every evening rolled up in my nightclothes and carried it out rolled up in my school clothes. After a few minutes, my imagination would take over and it would all go well, imaginary girls flitting over the dim screen of my mind, quick, anonymous, silent and ever changing. Misato crept in, too, after I moved in, eager, teasing, with her dark hair and generous curves, but Touji and Kensuke wouldn't stop talking about her. I felt guilty inside and cringed, pretending not to notice what they saw. And then one day, I didn't. She was Misato, and she was beautiful, but it didn't seem to work anymore. Once I fantasized about Rei, taking her thin, pale body forcefully on the filthy floor of her apartment as she stared up at me with strangled questions pooling in the corners of her eyes. I couldn't look at her for days afterwards. Then Asuka moved in, and it all ended and began anew. Nothing else was ever half as good. I threw the magazine away.  
  
Sometimes it began with the both of us in the kitchen. She was yelling at me for something, reaching out to push me. I would grab her wrist, forcing her backwards towards the wall. We would trip, and I would land on top of her. She would wriggle and fight, biting, yelling, but I held her strongly and the biting, the struggling, would slowly metamorphose as her curses turned to moans. Sometimes I stumbled into the bathroom, and she was already there, steam wrapped around her and rising off her perfect shoulders as she beckoned, or she might call from the kitchen... "Shinji, I'm bored..." We wouldn't even care that Pen-Pen was watching. Once, even in the entry plug of unit two after our battle with the angel, our minds still synched, the incredible force of her will pressing against me as we struggled out of our plug suits, flushed with victory and the slippery intoxication of our mutual amniotic fluid.  
  
Regardless of how it began, it always ended with my head thrown back and bottom lip between my teeth, her eyes filling my vision, something miraculously not my hands working steadily below my waist. I knew that I could never say her name out loud. If she heard me, she would beat me senseless for my perversions. And worse, never speak to me again.  
  
I practically shouted it. She fell away. The water was suddenly cold. I washed my hand, the yellowish material in my palm coagulating in the spray and sliding between my fingers to swirl around my feet.  
  
The smell of death drags me back. I vaguely remembered hearing of shelters destroyed in the explosion, thousands buried. No rescue crews. The cat's dead eyes stared up at me like moist raisins. I looked at it over the handlebars of my bicycle. It looked like it was made of leather. I was supposed to get the collar -- that was what uncle had said to do when such things happened, so that the owner could be called. I didn't want to touch it, so I found a stick in the ditch. When I poked it, the head came off and hundreds of iridescent wings poured out and filled the air around me. I had to hold buckets for getting to school late, my stomach still churning. When I threw up again in the hall, I had to hold more buckets. There was no number on the pink metal disk hanging from the collar, just a name: "AKI."  
  
Death was coming, and I couldn't stop it. Not even Asuka could stop it, and if Asuka couldn't stop it, then nothing could stop it. She sobbed in the control chair, speaking softly in a language I recognized but couldn't understand. The liquid around her smelled like stale blood and drew clouds of black flies and men in masks and yellow suits as it dried. I wasn't supposed to cross a line of some sort. It was all marked out in red and black plastic strips, but it didn't matter much. It wasn't her. She was gone. I turned away as the ambulance arrived. Asuka wouldn't break. That was someone else there. Maybe Asuka was at home, watching television. I turned away. There was nothing to see, nothing to see, I didn't know what to do, so I turned away. She would be okay. I would see her at home. She was strong, stronger than anything. Stronger than death, stronger than madness. Stronger than me, than I could ever even hope to be. So there was nothing that I could do, you know. Nothing.  
  
Misato was gone most of the time afterwards, and I crept by her room every morning, afraid that she might have come home some time in the night without my noticing. I was scared that if she heard me, she might want to talk, or I might hear her through the thin panel of the door, sobbing again into the bed sheets. Sometimes at night I did wake up, with the hall light shining through my tightly closed lids and her hair brushing my cheek as she hovered over me. I always lay as still as possible, praying with every breath just for her to leave. Once she said my name, very softly, and touched my hair. I only relaxed when I heard the sounds of my door sliding shut again and the slow tread of footsteps toward her room.  
  
The last angel was coming; we were going to die. Misato, myself, my father, Rei, the boy perched on the skeletal spar of a building that jutted out over the lake, the boy with strange, grey hair, smiling, smiling at me, as if he had just been born out of the waves.  
  
27-Dec-01 


End file.
